This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Not your wavering voice, not your long sighs, not the strangled apology that has arrived too late, too lamely.

You’re still a dissolute boor and a fraud. And you still insist on remaining mayor, when the best you could do for this city, should do for this city, is relinquish it.

Let go, Rob. Leave us be.

Article Continued Below

We deserve to be released from this long, cruel, epic tragicomedy.

It’s a job you doubtlessly love but a privilege you have squandered. Atonement, if genuine, must begin with your resignation. But you are endlessly disingenuous, so there’s no end in sight.

More implicating court documents likely to be released, more shifting and slinking likely from you.

More wrongdoing exposed.

More colossally bad judgment.

Who can possible predict what comes next, when all that’s come before is so preposterous?

A mayor who smokes crack.

A mayor pissed and pissing in public.

A mayor who keeps company with crooks and criminals.

A mayor who cannot grasp why he’s unfit for office, even whilst standing amidst the ruins of his reputation.

“God bless the people of Toronto,” indeed. God forgive us our trespasses, rather, the Ford Nation that inflicted this man on us and cleave yet to so odious a mayor, a global laughingstock, a punchline.

He didn’t lie about it — we simply failed to ask the correct question. Another bundle of bollocks.

As if it’s our fault, the media, that our mayor has been trumpeting a lie since reports of the infamous crack video exploded in May.

Ford’s excuse for probably smoking crack is that he’s a drunk.

Ford’s defense for lying about it, and trashing everybody who’s had the audacity to question his behavior —including, via goofball brother Doug, Toronto’s chief of police —is that, goodness, how can he possibly recall what he gets up to when boozed to the gills?

Ford’s alibi for the endless prevarication, the flim-flam, is that he hadn’t, still hasn’t, seen the video. His gamble is that, if the public does get to eyeball the footage, the mayor will appear so obviously and monumentally plastered that a reasonable person would concede diminished responsibility.

Lawyers have made flimsier arguments in court, successfully. Ford needs only to convince Ford Nation, clearly predisposed to forgiving the big lug anything.

Make no mistake: Ford’s pitiful confession Tuesday was triggered by Chief Bill Blair’s confirmation last Thursday that the video is real, that it shows precisely what two Star reporters and Gawker’s editor said it did, and cops have it. The only puzzle is why Ford unburdened himself — narrowly — at this specific time. The provocative answer is that unbearable pressure had been brought to bear, and not necessarily by Blair.

This is a man who has surrounded himself with crooks and thugs, abided by them, exposing himself to blackmail and extortion.

Fellow travelers in his orbit have been murdered, wounded, beaten up and arrested.

The ripples of a police investigation into guns and drugs trafficking that tripped over Ford have extended to a suspect who flew out a window in Fort McMurray, an extortion and drug indictment against his friend and occasional driver Alexander “Sandro” Lisi, a manslaughter plea, and exposure of the matrix of seamy characters revolving around Toronto’s mayor.

Ford has put the city through hell, drip-drip-drip.

Ford must go.

But, of course, he won’t — you can’t make me.

Like a child: “I sincerely, sincerely, sincerely apologize.”

As if by repeating it thrice, the contrition is more credible.

Ford is sorry, all right — sorry that, in the end, he couldn’t wiggle out of his self-created woes.

“I embarrassed everyone in this city, and I will be forever sorry,” the mayor told a massive media congregation later in the afternoon, drawing heavy breath, the chastened penitent his most recent posture.

“There’s only one person to blame for this, and that is myself. I know admitting my mistake was the right thing to do, and I feel like a thousand pounds have been lifted off my shoulders.”

If so, that’s all that has been lifted.

This is a man without any moral integrity to lead, playing the pathos card now.

“I can’t explain how difficult this was to do. I hope, I hope, that nobody but nobody has to go through what I have gone through ...

“I have nothing left to hide.”

I wonder.

“I’m s-so sorry. I know, I know I have to regain your trust and your confidence,” said Ford, reading from a prepared statement.

“I was elected to do a job and that’s exactly what I’m going to continue doing.”

Jesus wept.

I don’t care that Ford’s a sot. I don’t care if he’s a little bit of a crack user rather than an addict, the fig leaf of coverage he posited.

But I do care, everyone should mind hugely, that he wielded victimhood in an increasingly frantic attempt to hold off the day of reckoning. Ford gave not a fig for the damage he was causing, or the character assassination he heaped on both critics and those merely concerned about his state of mind.

Ford turned personal melodrama into public farce.

He still won’t talk to police — the mayorof Toronto won’t talk to the police.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Ask me the question, Ford repeatedly asked reporters earlier Tuesday, during an unexpected, unannounced scrum outside his office. Ask me the right question, the one I now choose to answer.

“You asked me a question back in May, and you can repeat that question.”

It was a jaw-dropping display of attempted stage-management, from a mayor who rarely holds formal press conferences and has spent months running away from questions hurled.

When somebody in that media huddle finally twigged — we’re not always quick on the uptake — Ford had his opening.

“Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine. But am I an addict? No. Have I tried it? Probably in one of my drunken stupors, probably approximately about a year ago.”

What might be on the other tape — at least one other tape — that Blair has indicated exists and police have?

Did you ask your slimeball cronies to retrieve the tape, perhaps leading to the assault on brother-and-sister pals who were beaten during a home invasion — at the house where the video appears to have been shot — after allegations about the tape were made public?

What was contained in those packages that Lisi handed over to you during clandestine transactions?

The bombshell at city hall overtook by mere hours the astonishing frontal assault that brother Doug launched against Blair on Toronto’s radio airwaves and a later press conference.

This was Doug Ford not just flexing muscle against the city’s top cop, but trying to change the dial before his younger sibling rendered the whole exercise ridiculous.

The more irascible of the two Fords had just called for Blair to take a leave of absence over comments the chief made about the crack video last week — this from the bully who had spent the previous 48 hours adamantly rejecting calls that his brother take a leave of absence while he copes with his own sadly apparent issues.

“(Blair) believes he’s the judge, the jury and the executioner. He wanted to go out and put a political bullet right between the mayor’s eyes, and thought that would be the final bullet to knock the mayor off, and he showed his cards — he thought he had a royal flush and ... he had a couple pairs of deuces,” Doug blathered on AM640’s John Oakley Show.

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com